I'm currently in Porto Alegre, Brazil attending the 9th International Free Software Forum (FISL) - a huge conference with some seven thousand participants. My talk in the event will be about GeoClue, the geo-information framework designed for Linux-based mobile devices. For those unable to be there or missing the 9am talk because of the parties tonight, the slides are now...

I've been using my N810 as sort of an universal communicator for a while now, and for this it has generally served well. The only thing I really miss is Skype video calls. But other than that, I haven't been using the tablet too much. In real-world usage I've found the browser way too unresponsive, and the RSS reader too...

Yesterday Arttu Manninen posted notes on how to use git for MidCOM 3 development. In addition to the repo.org.cz usage he described, the other way to work on the next generation PHP framework for Midgard is using the GitHub service.
Rails on the Run has quite good tutorial.
Technorati Tags: midcom, midgard, git, github

In my company we're using the SubEthaEdit collaborative editor for our development work. It is nice to be able to share editing sessions when pair programming, or just showing a particular solution to a colleague. Yesterday's del.icio.us popular alerted me to the Zenburn color scheme for programmers. It is a quite nice low-contrast color scheme developed by Jani Nurminen. To...

In his recent blog post, Piotr Pokora showed how the the D-Bus API will work in Midgard 2. D-Bus is an interprocess communications system that is used heavily in modern Linux desktops like GNOME and KDE. With Midgard, the same system now becomes available for PHP and web applications:
midgard_python "service":
import dbus.mainloop.glib
import _midgard as midgard

A List Apart 256 has a very interesting article on Taking Control of Your Maps, explaining how to provide richer and more customized web map solutions using tools like OpenLayers and Mapnik, and the free data provided by OpenStreetMap: For the practical developer who wants to add geospatial information to a site or application, the Google Maps API has been...

Sampo Pankki, the bank that was formerly known as Postipankki, Leonia and just Sampo was recently bought by the Danish Danske Bank. As part of the merger they switched their IT systems to Danske Bank infrastructure in a huge EUR 200 million operation over the Easter. The switch had a lot of issues, causing website downtime, faulty account data and...

I sat down with GeoClue maintainer (and my former SoC student) Jussi Kukkonen to discuss how the project has been moving forward, and the situation is looking quite good. To those unfamiliar with GeoClue, here is a quick intro: GeoClue is a modular geoinformation service built on top of the D-Bus messaging system. The goal of the GeoClue project is...

This document has been written as a quick Midgardized version of the nice “Django at a glance” tutorial, in order to explain how the new and upcoming MidCOM 3 framework works. In addition publishing this as a blog post, this document will be maintained in the MidCOM 3 version control tree. MidCOM 3 has been designed to be an extensible...